Frida, Diego and friends at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale

At the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, the ambitious new Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibit begins with a painting that doubles as an inside joke.

In the two-story atrium that bends into the main gallery, the first artwork to greet visitors is the satirical "Successful People," Jose Clemente Orozco's confrontational portrait of an anonymous wealthy couple after the Mexican Revolution. The couple's eyes are half-lidded and their noses are turned up, the man wearing a blue bow tie and the woman with a mound of hair that resembles a soaked mop.

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Museum curator Bonnie Clearwater labels the painting by Orozco, one of Kahlo and Rivera's fellow revolutionaries, "a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that arts patrons are a hoity-toity group," but also a jab at the museum itself, which often takes itself "too seriously."

Still, it's hard not to treat the 75-work "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera From the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection and 20th Century Mexican Art From the Stanley and Pearl Goodman Collection," as anything less than crucial. More than half the photographs and paintings carry Kahlo's iconic self-portraits, her somber face permanently etched with isolation and physical suffering, along with Rivera's folk art paintings of working-class Mexicans before and after the revolution. The other half, taken from the Goodman collection, is devoted to works by the artists' countrymen, including Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Rufino Tamayo and Leonora Carrington.

"I wanted to bring greater awareness to the museum's strong resources, and to show, obviously, that Frida and Diego were not the only male and female artists working in Mexico at the time," Clearwater says on a recent museum tour, pointing to four navy-blue walls covered in paintings on loan from Stanley and Pearl Goodman, two Fort Lauderdale art collectors. "I wanted to unite the Gelman and the Goodman collections, which has never been done before."

But the bulk of the Kahlo and Rivera works belonged to the late Gelmans, two refugees from Europe who began amassing Mexican art after they married in 1941. They befriended Rivera and Kahlo while soaking in the stimulating art scene of midcentury Mexico, and Clearwater says Jacques even commissioned the couple to paint portraits of his "stunning" wife six times. In 1996, when Clearwater was executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, she recalls meeting a then-84-year-old Natasha as the museum prepared to show the Gelmans' Mexican art collection. (Clearwater borrowed the collection again from the Gelmans' friend, Robert R. Littman.)

"We had her there, sitting right next to her portrait [Kahlo's 'Portrait of Natasha Gelman']. She was in a wheelchair, but she was still a glamorous 84," Clearwater says. "I was moved to tears right there. A painting did that to me."

The portraits from Kahlo and Rivera, Clearwater adds, reveal a sharp contrast in style. Kahlo's "Portrait of Natasha Gelman," depicting the European blonde wearing a stern expression and a fur stole, as an example of "incredible feminine power" and "regality."

"But in Diego's portrait, he sees [Natasha] as the calla lily, the soft, exotic flower from the Mexican mountains," Clearwater says, referring to Rivera's own "Portrait of Natasha Gelman," which depicts the art collector posing in a white satin dress on a couch. "The couch is pushed right up to the picture plane, like it's falling toward you. She's real flesh and blood here: seductive, glamorous, and perhaps weak, until you see her bright, red, pointy nails. Ouch!"

Midway through the gallery, against walls painted bright yellow, is Kahlo's masterwork "Diego on My Mind (Self-portrait as Tehuana)." Here, the painter's face is wrapped in the headdress of a Tehuana, a reference to her pre-Columbian ancestors and to the matriarchal society living in the Mexican city Tehuantepec. Inscribed on her head is a likeness of Rivera, which an essay in the museum's catalog describes as "longing for deeper companionship with Rivera, who was so often absent or unfaithful."

Nearby is her "Chromofore, Auxochrome," a collage of a medical drawing with the subject's foot torn off, a reference to Kahlo's 1925 trolley accident that left her right leg damaged (she later amputated it below the knee). Toward the end of the exhibit is Kahlo's "Self-portrait With Monkeys."

"She never thought of herself as a surrealist. She painted reality. She painted her pet monkeys," Clearwater says. "She's actually quite beautiful. Look at some of her color photographs, and then look at her self-portraits. She's exaggerated some of her features. The unibrow is more prominent in paintings. It's an ancient beauty."

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A separate room in the main gallery will focus on Kahlo and Rivera's global influence. A video projection by the Japanese artist Morimoto, who dresses in traditional Mexican dresses inspired by Kahlo's paintings, will play on loop. Also on display are two Mexican folk dresses, including a headdress similar to the one Kahlo wears in "Diego on My Mind."

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera From the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection and 20th Century Mexican Art From the Stanley and Pearl Goodman Collection